Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free

published.
1898
After many years of alienation, Frances and Swan divorce. She moves into Maytham Hall, in Kent, with her son Vivian, a Harvard graduate in journalism. She conducts an unhappy affair with an abusive English doctor, Stephen Townsend. He wants to be a stage actor, and Frances arranges roles for him in the stage adaptations of her novels.
1899
In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim is published.
1900
Frances marries Townsend, reportedly under coercion: He had threatened to publicly reveal that she let him kiss her after
knowing him for two weeks. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams published.
1901
The Making of a Marchioness is published. Queen Victoria dies.
1902
Ongoing struggles with her abusive husband lead Frances to seek a separation. She continues working to exhaustion and is hospitalized.
1905
A Little Princess is published.
1909
Burnett moves to a house she has built in Plandome (Long Island) , New York.
1911
Her greatest work, The Secret Garden, is published. Its underlying themes regarding the power of the mind over the body reflect Burnett’s growing interest in Christian Science.
1913
T. Tembarom is published.
1914
Frances begins spending more time at her home in Bermuda, where she grows more than a hundred varieties of roses in her gardens. James Joyce’s Dubliners is published. World War I begins.
1915
The Lost Prince is published.
1917
T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations is published.
1920
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is published.
1922
The Head of the House of Coombe is published. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses are published. The appearance of modernist works causes some critics to find Burnett’s writing antiquated by comparison.
1924
Burnett dies of heart failure in Plandome on October 29.

INTRODUCTION
    Near the end of her life, looking back over six prolific decades in which she had published fifty-two books and written and produced thirteen plays, Frances Hodgson Burnett told her son Vivian, “With the best that was in me I have tried to write some happiness into the world” (Burnett, The Romantick Lady, p. 410; see “For Further Reading”). The Secret Garden, Burnett’s novel about a pair of lonely children who are healed physically and psychologically by cultivating an abandoned garden, has brought happiness to child readers, and more than a few adults, for nearly a hundred years. Praised by writer and critic Alison Lurie as “one of the most original and brilliant children’s books of the twentieth century,” The Secret Garden has never been out of print since its publication in 1911. The novel has been filmed several times, notably in 1949 and 1993; has been serialized by the BBC (in 1952, 1960, and 1975) and by Viacom in 1987; and has been made into a Tony Award-winning musical by Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon, in 1991.
    Although it was popular from the outset, The Secret Garden was not immediately recognized as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s most outstanding literary achievement. A typical review in The Bookman, while noting that the story contained “a deep vein of symbolism,” dismissed it as “an exceedingly pretty tale” (Gerzina, Frances Hodgson Burnett, p. 263; see “For Further Reading”). In Burnett’s lifetime The Secret Garden was eclipsed by her earlier children’s novel, the hugely successful Little Lord Fauntleroy. Published in 1886, Little Lord Fauntleroy was a late-Victorian Harry Potter. The story of a poor New York boy who faces a happy reversal of fortune when he is discovered to be the heir to an English earldom was a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and gave rise to a profitable industry of toys, statues, chocolates, playing cards, songs, and dramatizations. Mothers rushed to dress their sons in lace collars, wide-brimmed hats, and velvet breeches modeled on those worn by the author’s son Vivian (to his lifelong embarrassment) in the illustrations for Fauntleroy. Vivian’s outfit, in turn,